March 21 – May 31, 2025
On view at the Italian Cultural Institute @INNOVIT
710 Sansome St., San Francisco
By appointment MON-FRI, 10 AM – 4:30 PM
Email: contact.sanfrancisco@esteri.it
Start the virtual tour HERE
The Italian Cultural Institute San Francisco is pleased to present the exhibition “Evenings will return… The Voice of Italian Poetry” curated by Giovanna Iorio. The title chosen for the exhibition is inspired by the poem of the same name by Alfonso Gatto, who, with his incipit “Evenings will return to cool the piazzas in the blue” instills hope in a future that is a return to the dearest past and at the same time introduces a splendid synesthesia, the key to understanding the exhibition itself.
The Italian Cultural Institute San Francisco will exhibit voice portraits of seventeen among the Italian poets of the twentieth century present in the Poetry Sound Library Archive: Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alfonso Gatto, Giorgio Caproni, Franco Fortini, Sandro Penna, Alda Merini, but also contemporary poets such as Antonella Anedda, Carlo Bordini, Mariangela Gualtieri, Valerio Magrelli, Claudio Damiani, Mariapia Quintavalla, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Patrizia Cavalli and Giovanna Frene.
Next to each portrait, the visitor will be able to listen to the original voice of the author/authoress from whom the portrait was generated. The voices are accompanied by the original text in Italian and the English translation of the poetic texts, a unique opportunity to intensely experience the most engaging Italian poetry through image, voice and translation. The exhibition celebrates the poet’s voice and its eternal beauty through a highly original synesthesia of image, sound and word.
The voice portraits are spectrograms created by the multimedia artist Giovanna Iorio starting from the recording of the poet’s voice reading his own composition.
“Poems to listen to with your eyes, the exhibition […] is a gallery of human voices. The spectrograms transform the voice into a unique and unrepeatable imprint. [..] If technically these are three-dimensional traces obtained by breaking down a complex acoustic signal into its various simple components, philosophically these works build a sort of bridge, a pacification, between two opposing metaphysical traditions: on the one hand, the supporters of the voice, of the phonè, and therefore of the myth of presence and of the idea that precedes every sign; on the other, the supporters of the priority of the gramma. [..] Giovanna Iorio, an artist and poet who teaches Italian literature in London, has created a “world sound map of poetry” that is actually an archive: Poetry Sound Library. The list of poets is already very extensive, and from the Library website it is possible to listen to poems written by the authors themselves – from Eliot to Montale, from Dylan Thomas to Ginsberg, from Pasolini to Ungaretti, from Carlo Bordini to Amelia Rosselli, up to, among others, the youngest Italian and Irish poets. Fascinated by the epiphany of the poets’ voices, Giovanna Iorio tried to “capture” them visually. This is how the voice portraits were born, portraits of voices resulting from the symbiotic encounter between sounds and colors (and shapes).
Beppe Sebaste: What is a Voice Portrait?
Giovanna Iorio: A “voice portrait” is the portrait of a voice.
Beppe Sebaste: How do you portray a voice?
Giovanna Iorio: Starting from a sound track of a few minutes, I create a spectrogram.
Beppe Sebaste: What is a spectrogram?
Giovanna Iorio: It is the fingerprint of a voice. It is a graph that visualizes the voice.
Beppe Sebaste: But how do the colors decide to manifest themselves, how do you control their flow, and how (if necessary) do you stop it?
Giovanna Iorio: The colors are the result of a complicated algorithm that studies tones and shades. Then there are also aesthetic choices and reworkings. For example: each voice enters a kind of dark room in which I immerse the sounds. The result is spectacular every time. The colors of a spectrogram bring out warm or cold tones. When I transform a sound into its spectrogram, I continue to listen to the sound of the voice, similar to a flowing river.”
(from Poetry in the Air, introduction by Beppe Sebaste)
A special thank you to: Lucio Lazzaruolo and the Notturno Concertante for the music; Beppe Sebaste for agreeing to reuse his words to introduce the exhibition and of course Giovanna Iorio for selecting the poetic texts and portraits of the poets’ voices and for opening the Poetry Sound Library also for the benefit of the public of the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco; City Lights San Francisco.
Her interdisciplinary projects include Talking Chairs, featuring transparent chairs embedded with poets’ voices, Back to Analog, which explores poetry’s return to vinyl and Voice of Trees, geolocated sound walks that bring poetry to nature, turning trees and parks into immersive installations. In San Francisco, her Voice of Trees installation at Golden Gate Park was curated by Michael Rothenberg and Youssef Alaoui. The exhibition Evenings Will Return, The Voice of Italian Poetry, at the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, marks her first in the United States.